Conversation

I often see people claiming to be burned out on computer stuff, and if you work for a megacorp I can understand that. Computer #software isn't worse than it was in the past, it's just worse in different ways, and there is a lot more lock-in now which nobody talks about because they are so locked in that they don't even realize it.

In the old days computer software was bad mainly for technical reasons. Blue screen of death. Bugs and glitches. It was hard to obtain working device drivers for anything (modem, sound, graphics, webcams, printers). Realplayer and Flash existed, and they were a total PITA. In the mid 1990s, now considered a golden era, MS Windows was installed from about 20 floppy disks, any of which could develop a bad sector at any time, and there was always messing about with long serial codes.

Now computer software is bad as a business model. There are still bugs and wotnot, but that's less of an issue for the average user. So typically the software is spying on you with telemetry and trying to push adverts onto some percentage of your screen and trying to get you to have endless subscriptions to things rather than a one time payment. Typically antifeatures are being pushed on you against your wishes via web browsers or other systems, because of the business model. And no techbro in Silicon Valley understand the concept of consent, again because of the business model. Practices which would have been considered outrageous and unconscionable in the 1990s or 2000s - such as constantly spying on users, and then using the data for to gain leverage by exploiting individual weaknesses - is now completely normalized.